Certified Hosting - Resource Usage Agreement

What is a Resource Usage Policy?
In a nutshell, it’s a system we have in place that allows all of our shared hosting clients to get along with one another, while still enjoying the benefits of pooled resources in the form of a shared server. While these limits are not always set in stone, this is generally what we stick to. After years and years of testing and optimization, these are the guidelines that generally work out best for everybody. Please note that it is still entirely possible that some other activity not covered here can be considered resource abuse, and this is decided on at the sole discretion of Certified Hosting.

What is the real purpose of these policies?
These guidelines are in place to protect all our clients from low quality service. Providing a high quality always online server is our goal, but we can’t do that if even one person decides to take advantage of the situation and eat up all the server resources. Generally, only 1 in 200 accounts will ever have an issue and the vast majority of those users are able to get it resolved without much of a problem, but it’s still important to have the policies in place and for our users to be aware of them.

At what point are these policies enforced?

Many of these specific limits are what is considered a “soft” limit, which means that often times you’re able to be at or even go past the limits laid out here. This depends on the situation of course, but as long as any given account is not constantly using more than it’s fair share, there usually isn’t a problem. If it is, we do everything we can to give as much notice about the problem as possible, although we usually require that a user at least respond to any such notice within 48 hours. However, should an account begin to crash the server or otherwise make things so slow that everyone else is affected, we will have no choice but to suspend the account and work with the user to figure out the best way forward with their account.

If you have any questions about any of this, please contact us and we’ll be happy to elaborate or advise you as needed.

General Account Limitations

An account may not do any of the following:

Use the Service in connection with unlawful contests, lotteries, or gambling; pyramid schemes, chain letters, junk email, spamming or any duplicative or unsolicited messages (commercial or otherwise).

Upload files that contain viruses, Trojan horses, worms, time bombs, cancelbots, corrupted files, or any other similar software or programs that may damage the operation of another’s property.

Use the Service for any public IRC interconnections. i.e. hosting an IRC daemon or reselling / providing shell services where IRC clients and or bots are utilized.

Use the service for a primary business of email services. This may include free email services to the public, opt-in lists, double opt-in, or any matter of regular bulk email services.

Run any type of web spider or indexer (including Google Cash / AdSpy)

Run any bit torrent application, tracker, or client. You may link to legal torrents off-site but may not host or store them.

Run any gaming servers such as counter-strike, half-life, battlefield1942, etc

Processes
Generally, processes are factored on a whole account basis, and includes things like php scripts, crons, shell commands or any other method your user might use to generate processes. Although there is some flexibility these are the general limitations in place:

An account may not consume more than 512 MB of physical RAM and 512 MB of virtual RAM at any given moment.

Any specific process may not utilize in excess of 30 seconds of CPU time.

Any specific process may not utilize in excess of 15 percent of total CPU power.

The maximum number of concurrent apache connections should not exceed 15.

The maximum number of concurrent running processes per account should not exceed 15.

An account may not have programs or scripts that run in the background or listen on a network port. If you require any sort of daemon or background service to run (For example Red5), you will need to go with a dedicated server.

Database Restrictions

MySQL databases are restricted to 10 connections per MySQL user and 100 connections per database.

Each MySQL database is restricted to a maximum of 1 GB of disk space.

Database reads (queries) should not exceed around 3k/hour.

Database writes (insert/update/delete) should not exceed around 1k/hour.

Databases may not be accessed remotely, all databases must only be accessed by local scripts hosted on the server.

Files and Directories Limitations
The total number of inodes in an account may not exceed 250,000. Every singe file, including web pages, images, emails, script files, directories, etc. on your account uses up one inode. Although not part of a specific policy, you’ll want to avoid having more
than 2000 files in a single directory as the FTP server will not list more than this number.

Emails

There is a strict limit of 300 emails sent per hour per account on shared hosting servers. This limit is not in place on dedicated servers.

Accounts are limited to 30 email checks per hour. Exceeding this will result in an “incorrect login” error.

Mailing lists with more than five thousand (5,000) address recipients must use a Dedicated Server hosting plan. Splitting a larger mailing list into smaller lists to avoid this restriction is not allowed.

Mailing list transmissions must be throttled; As stated above, there is a three hundred (300) message per hour limitation on all accounts. Attempts to simultaneously send messages to a mailing list with, for example, six hundred (600) recipients will fail unless You throttle the transmission.

In addition to Your messages not being delivered, failing to throttle transmissions to a large mailing list may place a heavy burden on the specific mail server handling the request. This may affect Your site and any other site which may be hosted on the same server.

Mailing lists with over one thousand (1,000) e-mail address recipients may only initiate transmission during off-peak hours. Off-peak hours are any time during Saturday or Sunday, and 1:00 A.M. to 8:00 A.M. EST Monday through Friday.

All mailing lists MUST use a double opt-in method for adding subscribers. A double opt-in process requires that 1) a subscriber first signs up for the list, and 2) the subscriber then receives an e-mail requiring the subscriber to further confirm the subscription request, either via a hyperlink or via reply to the e-mail.

All mail originating from Your mailing lists must contain instructions for subscribers to remove themselves from the list. The mechanism You employ to handle such opt-out or removal requests must expeditiously process removal requests.

Cron Jobs
A cron job should not execute more frequently than once every 15 minutes.

Back-Ups
We do not allow our shared hosting accounts to be used for the purposes of backups. This means you may not simply upload copies of all your personal photos or music collection or anything like that. All data on your shared account MUST be used for the purposes of an active website, at all times. This means if you upload a photo, you must link to that photo in some way via your website. Same with any file. We also do not allow you to store more than one account backup on the server at a time. We highly encourage you to frequently generate and download backups of your account, but it’s important to remove them from the server when you are done.

Are these all of your policies?
No. We have a few more terms and conditions that must be agreed to before you sign up with us and use our servers or services. We have simply outlined the most important ones and the most common ones that come up for the sake of making sure everyone is aware of the important stuff.